Beyond the boundaries of established science an avalanche of exotic ideas compete for our attention. Experts tell us that these ideas should not be permitted to take up the time of working scientists, and for the most part they are surely correct. But what about the gems in the rubble pile? By what ground-rules might we bring extraordinary new possibilities to light?

Published time: 14 Mar, 2017 09:33Native American tribe may have been wiped out by asteroid – studyThe Clovis people were a prehistoric Native American culture that existed roughly 13,200 to 12,900 years ago who suddenly died out at the end of the last Ice Age, along with 35 iconic species of animals with little or no explanation as to why – until now.A team of three archaeologists at the University of South Carolina recently published a study which looked at 11 dig sites across North America and found elevated levels of platinum in very specific soil layers.

“The presence of elevated platinum in archaeological sites is a confirmation of data previously reported for the Younger-Dryas onset several years ago in a Greenland ice-core,” Christopher Moore, the lead author of the study, told the Archaeology News Network.

This ‘Younger-Dryas’ period is best known as one of extreme cooling that began around 12,800 years ago and lasted for roughly 1,400 years.

This period coincided with the end of the Clovis culture and the extinction of over 35 species of Ice Age animals, including woolly mammoths, mastodons and saber-tooth tigers. But why would they die out if they had already managed to survive through an ice age

“Platinum is very rare in Earth’s crust, but it is common in asteroids and comets,” Moore said.

allynh, I think we need to consider large arc mode discharges rather than impactors in the formation of the elements noted. I am not saying that no objects ever approach Earth, but that Coulombs law will prevent them ever reaching the surface intact, they will be deflected or discharge will turn them to dust and debris. Both arc and non arc mode duscharges will occur between the approaching object and Earth, and if subsurface discharges due to dielectric breakdown occur, then with sufficient energy there will be high energy gamma rays produced in the arc. This can trigger the photodisintegration process, so bombarding whatever the subsurface material with neutrons. Depending on the nature of the discharge then, we might expect the creation of many elements, including the platinum group ones.

Hi Allynh, Grey Cloud, GaryN,Here's a take by a mathematician, you can always trust someone who can do the math....

A hypothetical with a mirror earth called Htrae having a near miss with earth, the person who wrote this scenario on this 'askamathematician.com' website has imagined a situation with Earth and another hypothetical planet nearly touching, the two planets orbiting in opposite directions, and (doesn't mention daily spin, or moon, or magnetosphere)....

Earth is grazed by an equal size planet:

"A near miss is a lot less flashy, but you really wouldn’t want to be around for that either. When you’re between two equal masses, you’re pulled equally by both. You may be standing on the surface of Earth, but most of it is still a long way away (about 4,000 miles on average). So if Htrae’s surface was within spitting distance, then you’d be about 4,000 miles from most of it as well. Nothing on the surface of Earth has any special “Earth-gravity-solidarity”, so if you were “lucky” enough to be standing right under Htrae as it passed overhead, you’d find yourself in nearly zero gravity."

"Of course, there’s nothing special about stuff that’s on the surface either. The surface itself would also start floating around, and the local atmosphere would certainly take the opportunity to wander off. On a large scale this is described by the planets being well within each others’ Roche limit, which means that they literally just kinda fall apart. It’s not just that the region between the planets is in free fall, it’s that halfway around the worlds gravity will suddenly be pointing sideways quite a bit. So, what does a land-slide the size of a planet look like? From a distance it’s likely to be amazing, but you’re gonna want that distance to be pretty big."

"Even a near miss, with the planets never quite coming into contact, does a colossal amount of damage. There would be a cloud of debris between and orbiting around both planets (or rather around both “roiling molten masses”) as well as long streamers of what used to be ocean, crust, and mantle extending between them as they move apart. This has never been seen on a planetary scale, since all the things doing the impacting these days barely have their own gravity. <...>

<...>All of the damage and scrambling that Earth and Htrae did do each other took energy. That energy is taken mostly from the kinetic energy, so after a near miss the average speed of the two planets would be less than it was before.

So my take would be, what would happen if an Venus size planet passed in the same direction, from an orbit further out towards Jupiter, quite far away from the Earth, with something like 80,000 km to 100,000 km between them?

Just far enough away that assuming each planet had much denser atmospheres in the past, Earth had a thicker atmosphere to help support the giant dinosaurs and such, the middle of the two magnetospheres passed through each other, (the top of earth's current magnetosphere is approx 65,000 km high), the two magnetospheres interact with violent electric discharges, both planets experience violent vulcanism, Venus steals Earth's excess atmosphere, the event slows Venus' rotation and leaves Venus in retrograde motion, but still orbiting the Sun in a modified orbit, the close call pulling Venus closer to the sun, so after passing the sun and the Earth closer a couple of times the Earth and Venus' orbits gradually become more stable due to resonant effects... the interaction leaving Venus very hot and with a huge CO2 and sulphuric acid atmosphere, the earth's crust is fractured and moved in some places, maybe the whole crust moves relative to the iron core, heating the magma in the earth's molten core, the whole North American plate shifted westward a bit for example... huge tides slosh around, creating huge deposits of sand, and mud and smashed up vegetation... this would be a definitely catastrophic event, vast majority of animals and species on Earth is killed, leaves lots of smashed up animals and plant matter to eventually become coal and oil, covered in sediment, maybe there was another body involved, like Mars...

I found that none of this is forbidden by celestial orbital mechanics, the Ransom Hoffee orbits for one describe a similar set of events, the recent proving of gravity assist moves with space probes show nothing like this is impossible, (there's a set of nine animated gravity assist orbital manouvres illustrated down the page a bit):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assistDiscussion of Velikovsky's proposed events, and the orbits involved:http://www00.unibg.it/dati/persone/636/411.pdf

mmm on second thoughts, Planet9 is way too big and much too far away.. forget that idea

There are plenty of other candidates... maybe hundreds:"It is now widely accepted that collisions in the past have had a significant role in shaping the geological and biological history of the Earth..."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object

I think that the comet Shoemaker Levy 9 slamming into Jupiter with the force of 300 Gigatons of TNT made lots of people change their minds about catastrophism...

"...fragment A of the nucleus entered Jupiter's southern hemisphere at a speed of about 60 km/s. Instruments on Galileo detected a fireball that reached a peak temperature of about 24,000 K, compared to the typical Jovian cloudtop temperature of about 130 K, before expanding and cooling rapidly to about 1500 K after 40 s."

" when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT...The plume from the fireball quickly reached a height of over 3,000 km..."

"...The size of the parent comet was calculated to be about 1.8 km in diameter.These predictions were among the few that were actually confirmed by subsequent observation."

I can see his argument against GET, because of the perceived time frame of growth, but if you have read through the thread you can see I've mentioned that all the growth has happened far faster.

People like Neal Adams and James Maxlow tried to describe the process within the limits of "consensus age". They are trying to convince "consensus science" that with just a modest change of viewpoint that they would accept GET. The problem is, that science moves forward with every funeral. i.e, GET will only be accepted over their dead bodies. Time will take care of that.

I contend, that it would take less than a billion dollars, using existing worldwide GPS base stations, to prove Growing Earth Theory.

All we need now is a multi billionaire willing to spend the money on the research. HA!

allynh wrote:I contend, that it would take less than a billion dollars, using existing worldwide GPS base stations, to prove Growing Earth Theory.

I would be interested if anyone were able to actually disprove GET. It's the only theory that's compatible with all phenomena. Every other theory has flaws that require either massive leaps of faith or total ignorance of certain specifics. Essentially the only flaw in GET is the mechanism by which planetary bodies gain mass/size. Once that is found there are no valid criticisms and it will become the predominant theory again.

Hawaiian navigators sailing multi-hulled canoe, c. 1781If you've got a globe of the Earth in your house, turn it so that the Tuamoto Archipelago in Polynesia is at the centre of your view - and you'll find from that vantage point in 'space', Earth looks like a water planet, with barely any land in sight on the visible 'disk' of the Earth.

Then consider that the ancient Polynesians settled many of the tiny islands that dot that great expanse of inhospitable ocean, and you have to wonder how they were able to do so - Easter Island itself is around 1000 miles from the nearest habitable land. For centuries, European academics put the settlement of these various islands down to accident - without any of the complex instrumentation used by European navigators, Pacific Islanders obviously just drifted around until they lucked out by hitting land (seriously, can you imagine hopping in a small boat with the intention of just drifting till you found something?).

Opinions on how Polynesians reached these small islands began changing in the second half of the 20th century though, especially after the 1972 publication of Dr David H. Lewis's We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Pacific Landfinding in the Pacific. Lewis did extensive research on Pacific literature before embarking on a 9-month voyage along with elderly navigators from nine different archipelagos.

What Lewis, and others, found, was that traditional Polynesian navigation was a precise 'science', that used an array of techniques - including using celestial objects (the Sun during the day, stars at night), the movements of wildlife (e.g. birds), the way the swell changed, and even phosphorescence in the sea!

A fascinating recent article at The Conversation delves into some of the techniques of celestial navigation used by the ancient Polynesians, some of which were included in the recent animated movie Moana:

To calculate their position on Earth, voyagers memorised star maps and used the angle of stars above the horizon to determine latitude. For example, the top and bottom stars of the Southern Cross are separated by six degrees. When the distance between those stars is equal to the bottom star’s altitude above the horizon, your northerly latitude is 21º: that of Honolulu.

When the bright stars Sirius and Pollux set at exactly the same time, your latitude is 18º South: the latitude of Tahiti.

Voyagers measure the angles between stars and the horizon using their hands. The width of your pinkie finger at arm’s length is roughly one degree, or double the angular diameter of the Sun or Moon.

Hold your hand with the palm facing outward and thumb fully extended, touching the horizon. Each part of your hand is used to measure a particular altitude.

Celestial navigation in MoanaAs fascinating as the celestial navigation techniques of the ancient Polynesians are, in recent years another scholar has discussed an even more intriguing, mysterious navigational method. Marianne George, who has a PhD in cultural anthropology, sailed with David H. Lewis in 1993 to the Santa Cruz Islands, and both were surprised to learn that there was an elderly traditional navigator there by the name of Te Aliki Koloso Kahia Kaveia, who offered to share his knowledge about Stone Age methods of navigation:

[W]hile David Lewis and I were at his home in Taumako, and just after we spent a day and a half going through a copy of Lewis' We, the Navigators with him, Kaveia pointedly asked David "Would you like to know the Polynesian navigation system?"

Kaveia covered the usual techniques, such as pointing out "a succession of ten main navigational stars as they rose through the night, and based on feeling the swells moving under my boat he named and described the patterns of swell refraction and reflection in the open sea." He also described a complex system of understanding the winds. But he also pointed out something new: Te Lapa, or 'The Flashing', a water-bound light phenomenon that appears to emanate from land.

Use of te lapa is usually only done within about 120 miles from shore. So, strictly speaking, it may be regarded as a piloting method rather than a navigational method. But since most Santa Cruz Islands, and most Pacific islands, are located within 100 or so miles of each other, te lapa is a method that Kaveia used frequently.

...Some oceanic lights are well known and documented, and many of these have very credible scientific explanations. This is not the case with te lapa.

Both George and Lewis, under Kaveia's tutelage, were able to observe te lapa (George herself sailed 25 separate voyages with Kaveia, or under his direction, over the next 15 years). According to George:

Te lapa is generally described by Kaveia and other Taumako/Vaeakau voyagers as white and lightning-like. I saw it white or magnesium-white colored, like lightning...

...According to Kaveia, the lightning-like te lapa bolts are straight lines... My eyes could see that there was a beginning and end of the line of light bolts coming toward me. It happens so fast -in just a fraction of a second - that it is not easy to see or describe. But what I have seen confirms Kaveia's assertion that the bolts are instantaneous, straight in form, and that they emanate straight from land.

In 1998, while showing me te lapa...Kaveia said to me, "So it is like the islands are sending these bolts of light lines out, and if we look for them when we are at sea then many times we can see them and know the exact direction toward the island.

Artistic depiction of Te LapaThere is still no known cause of te lapa. It is a fact that more than 80% of ocean life makes light (bioluminescence) - including "one deep sea jellyfish that can be seen over 300 feet away" and a squid that "sends out photon torpedoes when threatened" - so perhaps there is some link between te lapa and bioluminescent ocean life. However, researchers have yet to find a solid explanation that explains the phenomenon - not least the fact that it appears to be directional from land up to 100 miles away.

In her article on te lapa ("Polynesian Navigation and Te Lapa - 'The Flashing'", in Time and Mind 5:2), George discusses some other possible explanations. Could islands and their surrounding reefs emit electrical charges that 'jump' to other islands, just as lightning jumps from clouds to earth? Or could it be a non-electric form of light that is reflected and refracted by swells that act as lenses? Or perhaps te lapa is caused by magnetic or electrical fields created by tectonic energy emissions.

Unfortunately, George says, the scientists who might be capable of resolving the mystery "have never seen it - or do not know about it yet", and so the phenomenon remains largely unexamined.

Beyond science though, George even goes so far as to suggest the explanation could be non-physical, that te lapa might be "a phenomenon seen only by people who are psychically and spiritually connected to the ocean as a result of decades of seatime and experience with life there."

But ultimately, George says the topic deserves further research - by employing high-tech low-light cameras, confirmation of any physical source should be possible, and could lead to new understandings about light, waves, islands, the ocean and ocean animals.

Yikes! They kept trying different ways to duplicate the outer crust, yet it shows that "silicate rain" fell from the air. Ignore their theory that needs too many different events, and see that the data is a clear sign of transmutation.

EarthA composite image of the Western hemisphere of the Earth. Credit: NASA

More than 90% of Earth's continental crust is made up of silica-rich minerals, such as feldspar and quartz. But where did this silica-enriched material come from? And could it provide a clue in the search for life on other planets?

Conventional theory holds that all of the early Earth's crustal ingredients were formed by volcanic activity. Now, however, McGill University earth scientists Don Baker and Kassandra Sofonio have published a theory with a novel twist: some of the chemical components of this material settled onto Earth's early surface from the steamy atmosphere that prevailed at the time.

First, a bit of ancient geochemical history: Scientists believe that a Mars-sized planetoid plowed into the proto-Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, melting the Earth and turning it into an ocean of magma. In the wake of that impact—which also created enough debris to form the moon—the Earth's surface gradually cooled until it was more or less solid. Baker's new theory, like the conventional one, is based on that premise.

The atmosphere following that collision, however, consisted of high-temperature steam that dissolved rocks on the Earth's immediate surface—"much like how sugar is dissolved in coffee," Baker explains. This is where the new wrinkle comes in. "These dissolved minerals rose to the upper atmosphere and cooled off, and then these silicate materials that were dissolved at the surface would start to separate out and fall back to Earth in what we call a silicate rain."

To test this theory, Baker and co-author Kassandra Sofonio, a McGill undergraduate research assistant, spent months developing a series of laboratory experiments designed to mimic the steamy conditions on early Earth. A mixture of bulk silicate earth materials and water was melted in air at 1,550 degrees Celsius, then ground to a powder. Small amounts of the powder, along with water, were then enclosed in gold palladium capsules, placed in a pressure vessel and heated to about 727 degrees Celsius and 100 times Earth's surface pressure to simulate conditions in the Earth's atmosphere about 1 million years after the moon-forming impact. After each experiment, samples were rapidly quenched and the material that had been dissolved in the high temperature steam analyzed.

The experiments were guided by other scientists' previous experiments on rock-water interactions at high pressures, and by the McGill team's own preliminary calculations, Baker notes. Even so, "we were surprised by the similarity of the dissolved silicate material produced by the experiments" to that found in the Earth's crust.

Their resulting paper, published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, posits a new theory of "aerial metasomatism"—a term coined by Sofonio to describe the process by which silica minerals condensed and fell back to earth over about a million years, producing some of the earliest rock specimens known today.

"Our experiment shows the chemistry of this process," and could provide scientists with important clues as to which exoplanets might have the capacity to harbor life Baker says.

"This time in early Earth's history is still really exciting," he adds. "A lot of people think that life started very soon after these events that we're talking about. This is setting up the stages for the Earth being ready to support life."

A cool climate, sulfur and volcanism may have thrust the planet into an extreme glacial state

Annie Sneed

Credit: Alexandre Buisse Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)Eons ago Earth experienced a wild transformation: it turned into a giant snowball. These massive glaciation events, where ice encased the planet from pole-to-pole, are fittingly named “snowball Earth.” There were at least two occurrences: one around 717 million and another some 645 million years ago.

Although geologists have good evidence Earth experienced these snowball events, they still cannot figure out howthey happened. Scientists have debated for decades over what set off the most profound climatic changes in the planet’s geologic record. Now researchers at Harvard University have a new idea that may finally provide an answer: They say volcanic regions, located in the right place at the right time, may have triggered at least the one of these giant glaciation events.

If you traveled back in time to Earth about 700 million years ago, you would have found ice hundreds of meters thick covering the oceans and continents, although the land masses may have also had some bare, dry areas dotted with ice-covered hypersaline lakes. The average global temperature fell around negative 37 degrees Fahrenheit. The snowball-like Earth was largely uninhabitable. Thankfully, these apocalyptic glacial periods happen rarely—but that fact also makes it hard for scientists to determine how such an extreme climate formed. “The further we go back in time, the more Earth resembles a world very different from the one we live on today,” explains Linda Sohl, a paleoclimatologist at Columbia University's Center for Climate Systems Research and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies “So we can’t readily interpret the past based on our knowledge of the present.”

Researchers have proposed a host of ideas about what sparked snowball Earths. The cause—whatever it was—had to cool the planet so that enough ice formed to reflect much of the sun’s incoming energy, creating a runaway cooling effect. One hypothesis suggests a large meteorite hit the planet and threw up so much dust and ash into the air it reduced the incoming solar radiation for a couple years and chilled the planet. Other ideas involve similar types of brief but catastrophic events, such as a gigantic volcanic eruption. Yet another hypothesis proposes some kind of organism evolved that could remove a large amount of carbon from the surface of the ocean and bury it in deep sediments after they died and settled on the ocean floor; that mechanism would theoretically have kept enough carbon out of the atmosphere to cause runaway cooling. None of these ideas have much—if any—physical evidence to back them up, however.

One of the most popular ideas focuses on weathering, a natural process that captures and stores carbon via the chemical breakdown of rocks. When the supercontinent Rodinia broke up around 750 million years ago, the new, smaller continents scattered to locations around the equator where it was warm and wet—prime conditions for weathering. In addition, large volcanic regions would have emerged as the giant land mass fragmented, which would have been extremely vulnerable to weathering.

The problem: weathering works incredibly slowly—the process is constantly happening but it affects the global climate on a million-year time scale. Earth’s climate system usually self-corrects in that amount of time. Plus, the greater volcanic activity would have released carbon dioxide, making it even harder to push Earth into a snowball state. This supercontinent breakup scenario could have caused a runaway cooling effect only if weathering outpaced other feedbacks in the climate system, explains Francis Macdonald, an associate professor of geology at Harvard.

Because none of the ideas is completely satisfactory, Macdonald and colleague Robin Wordsworth, an assistant professor of environmental science and engineering, set out to find another explanation. In 2010 Macdonald published a paper that, for the first time, pinned down the precise date when the Sturtian glaciation—the first of the two snowball Earths—began. “We could suddenly say within a few hundred thousand years when this event actually occurred,” Macdonald explains. “Before, it had only been known within tens of millions of years.” He discovered Sturtian glaciation started around 717 million years ago.

Around the same time, Macdonald dated a volcanic region, called the Franklin Large Igneous Province (LIP). He discovered the Franklin LIP became active close to when the first snowball Earth event began. “I started thinking: How could these be so coincident? How might they be related?” he says.

Armed with this new information, Macdonald and Wordsworth used a combination of geologic evidence and modeling to test whether the Franklin LIP could be the culprit. In a new study, published in February in Geophysical Research Letters, they show the Franklin LIP’s volcanic activity could have caused extreme climate cooling. That is because of a unique combination of factors: First, the Franklin LIP formed in an area rich in sulfur; as it erupted, large plumes of hot gas and dust would have lofted sulfur particles kilometers into the air. Sulfur particles block the incoming sun and also keep heat from escaping Earth, which can create either a warming or cooling effect, depending on the location. That’s why the next piece of physical evidence is key—geologic records show the Franklin LIP sat at the equator where Earth receives more solar energy than the amount of heat it radiates back out to space. According to the researchers’ model, if enough sulfur particles reached high enough into the atmosphere at this equatorial location, it would block enough of the sun’s incoming energy to trigger runaway cooling. The sulfur aerosols would have spread over the planet as well via mixing that occurs in the stratosphere, but the equatorial region would have the greatest density of sulfur particles, severely blocking the sun. The eruptions would have needed to blast sulfur into the atmosphere for about five years to push Earth into a snowball state.

Such a scenario would also require a relatively cool Earth ahead of time. Macdonald says that is because sulfur particles need to reach the altitude of the stratosphere to have maximum cooling effect. In a colder climate the stratosphere settles a little closer to Earth’s surface, making it possible for the sulfur-rich hot air plumes to reach. Although scientists have not determined exactly what the climate was like prior to snowball Earth, this new hypothesis is appealing, Macdonald says. “It provides a positive feedback mechanism. As you start cooling, then it gets easier and easier to put more sulfur aerosols up there, then Earth cools more, and so on,” he explains. This process would happen potentially so fast that it would overwhelm other climate feedbacks that might make the planet warmer.”

Other experts find Macdonald’s and Wordsworth idea compelling. “I would say it’s probably the best idea we have, because it’s actually based on observations,” says Joseph Kirschvink, a geobiologist at California Institute of Technology, who coined the term “snowball Earth.” Paul Hoffman, an emeritus professor of geology at Harvard, says the timing between the sulfur-rich Franklin volcanism and snowball Earth makes it an attractive explanation. But “it could just be a coincidence with no relation,” he explains. Linda Sohl says the pair have come up with an intriguing hypothesis, although she also says, “Does it explain all snowball events in Earth’s history? Almost certainly not.”

Hoffman also points out the researcher’s idea does not explain the second snowball event that came soon after the first, called the Marinoan glaciation. “I think that’s the weakest point in the idea,” he says. “So far as we know, there’s no large [volcanic regions] associated with the onset of the second.” Macdonald says there could have been one but that geologic evidence becomes patchy that far back in time. Macdonald himself is not convinced his and Wordsworth’s version of events is what actually occurred 717 million years ago. “We’re not saying this had to happen, just that it’s feasible and it’s a pretty impressive coincidence,” he explains.

Along with this new idea, Macdonald expresses a note of caution to people who have proposed geoengineering projects using sulfur aerosols to combat global warming. “It’s a little frightening if we want to play with these particles, to know they may have caused major climate change in the past,” he says. “On the other hand, we’re already geoengineering with carbon dioxide. The cat’s already out of the bag.”

Has anyone calculated how much an average earth atom would have to have expanded to give us as much surface expansion as the expanding earth idea demands?

I'll have a go.

We know that oceans cover about two thirds of the earth's present surface. Assuming most of that is the result of expansion (the ocean crust is young, mostly less than 150 million years old, whereas continental crust is as old as the hills , up to 4.5 billion years old ), we can determine overall volume increase. This would then would roughly translate into individual atomic (or more probably molecular) volume increases.

Earth's current radius is 6400km, giving a surface area of around 515 million sq km and a volume of about 1.1 million million cubic km.

And if two thirds of the current surface area is new crust then old crust is one third of the current surface, which is 515/3 giving a pre-expansion surface area of about 172 million sq km, a diameter of 3700 km and a volume of about 210 thousand million.

The volume ratio then is 1,100,000/210,000 or about 5:1, a 500% increase in volume. The calculations are listed below. For interest's sake the calculations for a 50% incease in surface area are also included. The ratio for this case is more like 3:1 or 300%.